‘We thought it was all dead and buried.’

‘Dead and buried? Not really. It must always have been in your mind.’

She shrugged hopelessly. ‘Well, you’re right. It was always in my mind. I was always wondering when something might happen, whether someone would talk. I knew it would only take a slip of the tongue, a careless remark.’

Fry couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with that sort of fear, the terror of a secret slipping out. No matter what Nancy Wharton said, it must fill every minute of your day, until you suffered from an unremitting paranoia about every little thing.

‘Later on, we moved everything,’ said Nancy. ‘They buried the anoraks and stuff, but the bodies … well, have you ever tried shifting a body? It took a couple of quad bikes to get them well away from the pub on to the moor. Then a few fires were started to draw attention away. That nearly went wrong. The wind changed direction, and the fires moved towards the pub instead of away. My God, watching that smoke coming nearer and nearer, we panicked. We had to get the freezers out of the cellar. We knew there’d be evidence – blood, and so on. We’d already cleaned up in the bedroom, scrubbed the floor with bleach, replaced the carpet and the bedding, even stripped off all the wallpaper and redecorated. It never came to an end, the clearing up and covering over. The blood always seemed to be there.’

‘Talking to yourself again, Ben?’

Cooper turned and found Villiers watching him. He had been so absorbed that he hadn’t heard her coming down the steps into the cellar.

‘No one else will listen to me,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Liz Petty is working in the Bakewell Room, where the Pearsons stayed. She says there’s blood residue everywhere.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘It’s going to keep her busy for a while. She ought to have some help, Ben.’

‘I know. I’ll call in and chase someone up. Well, I will when I can get a signal on my phone.’

‘I’m off network too,’ said Villiers.

‘It’s these cellars.’

‘Don’t you start to feel a bit uneasy when you’re out of touch? Or is it just me?’

‘It used to be like this all the time when I was in uniform. We didn’t have mobile phones, and the old analogue radios were almost useless in parts of this division.’

Villiers stepped into the office area. ‘What are you doing anyway?’

Cooper showed her the guest record. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘It’s a turn-up. But it doesn’t mean Mad Maurice wasn’t responsible for the deaths.’

‘It shows that Nancy wasn’t telling the truth, about that part of the story at least. And what was it she said in the interview? You can’t blame us for trying to protect our family. Anyone would have done it. That word “family” suggests more than just Maurice to me. It sounds like a mother talking about her children.’

As he spoke, Cooper moved back into the main part of the cellar and stood under the delivery hatchway that led outside. Stepping up on to the stone ledge, he heaved at the hatch. He managed to raise the edge of one door an inch or two before the weight of the furniture stacked on top prevented it moving any further. If he tilted his head at an angle, he found he could just see through the inch of space he’d created. He saw a rusty table leg in the foreground, a patch of burnt earth, and a length of concrete stretching away from the building.

Then he blinked in surprise. A white pickup stood by the garages, next to his own car. A Mitsubishi L200, if he wasn’t mistaken. But before he could see any more, the weight of the door proved too much for his bruised shoulder, and he had to let it down.

‘Whose is the pickup?’ he said.

Villiers stared at him. ‘Pickup? I’ve no idea.’

‘Has Josh Lane left?’

‘I think so. I saw him out of the building.’

‘Well did someone else arrive, then?’

‘I don’t know, Ben. You can’t hear anything from down here.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

Worried now, Cooper checked his phone for a signal and saw that it still read Network lost. Blasted cellar walls.

But he saw from the display that he’d received a text message before the network dropped. He tapped the messages icon and found a text from Diane Fry. You need to know this. DNA match confirmed from blood. Call asap.

‘Mmm. But who is it a match to?’

‘Sorry, Ben?’

‘It’s okay. I’m talking to myself again.’

‘Liz will have to cure you of that. We don’t want you getting a reputation as an eccentric.’

Cooper turned slowly and took in the cellar – the empty kegs, the abandoned equipment, the beer lines snaking upwards. He gazed at the ceiling, where the lines disappeared into the bar to connect to the pumps.

‘We’ve missed something, haven’t we?’ he said.

‘Have we?’ said Villiers. ‘We’ve been through every room – the kitchens, the bedrooms, all the stores and outbuildings. And now the cellars.’

But there was something lodged in the back of Cooper’s mind – the part of the brain that most resembled a landfill site, full of unwanted debris. If you poked around in the detritus long enough, you sometimes unearthed a valuable item you’d thought was lost.

‘Of course we’ve missed something,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed who the Pearsons talked to that night at the Light House.’

‘The night there was an argument with Gullick and Naylor?’

‘No, no – the next night, when it was the Young Farmers’ party.’

‘But we have lots of witness statements to show that, apart from the other tourists, the Pearsons didn’t speak to anyone in the bar that night. No one local.’

‘Of course they did,’ said Cooper.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

She threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘So you know better than all those witnesses?’

‘No. But I think they just weren’t asked the right questions. Of course there was someone they talked to.’

‘How?’

Cooper had that picture in his mind again of the people in the bar – the three middle aged men sitting on a bench discussing the quality of their beer, two young couples laughing at a table full of vodka bottles, an elderly woman on her own in the corner with a glass of Guinness and a plastic carrier bag. They all had one thing in common, and it was maddening that he’d missed it.

‘Well, David and Trisha Pearson didn’t sit in the bar all night without ordering any drinks, did they?’ he said.

Villiers looked at him open-mouthed. ‘Well, no …’

‘So they talked to …?’

‘The barman.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, a nice, friendly barman who liked to chat with his customers. A barman called Josh Lane.’

Because of his job, Josh Lane might have known most about the Pearsons. And without being asked, Lane had volunteered the information that he wasn’t here at the Light House on the day the Pearsons disappeared. That was almost certainly true. But he must have been here later, helping to cover up what had happened, and moving the bodies.

Josh Lane. Just like one of the family. Who had said that? The chef, Maclennan. Had Maclennan been closer to the truth than he thought?

And maybe Lane had helped to remove those freezers he’d been reluctant to acknowledge the existence of. If that was his Mitsubishi pickup, it would have been the perfect vehicle for the task. It also answered the description from the firefighters.

So Gullick and Naylor might have been part of a smoke-screen after all. Their names had cropped up several times. But they had most cleverly been floated by Josh Lane, with that pretence of loyalty to customers that now, in hindsight, seemed artificial and coy. Cooper couldn’t believe that he’d fallen for it. He’d turned into a sucker over a cup of espresso and steamed milk.

In retrospect, it should have been clear the exact moment when Lane changed from a friendly, helpful member of the public to the more cautious former employee who couldn’t quite remember what had stood against the wall. It had surely been when Cooper brought him down to the cellar and mentioned the Pearsons. The combination of the two must have made him feel as though he’d been led into a trap. If only, Cooper thought, he’d been so clever.